I'm pretty hard pressed to find any arm of the gawker network that I can find anything nice to say about. But this time it's their tech site Gizmodo that has outdone itself.

After accidentally receiving access to an apple store employee's text messages and phone data, they decided not to use the opportunity to highlight the particular bug of the iphone 4 in a constructive and useful way, instead they've used it to post the poor bastard's content all over internet. Keep it classy guys!

Gizmodo tells users not to bother changing their passwords anywhere, and to use the same password across sites throughout the internet... Forgetting to mention that almost exactly a year ago Gawker was hacked, thousands of user passwords were leaked and worst of all, they'd only bothered to hash the first four characters of said passwords, the rest was stored in clear text. This of course led to thousands of users experiencing the very problems they're now saying are not ever likely to occur.

my current beef against gawker is their "mail of tears" feature. it's horribly racist and yet it is defended because the "native american" used in the image is the one from those old anti-littering ads and the horrible nerds claim he's sicilian and therefore it's not racist.

no one tries to excuse their pun on trail of tears though. they're all terrible.

This is why I almost never self-identify as a feminist. If I do I have to qualify it a billion times so people know I don't mean feminist-who-only-cares-about-white-women-in-their-twenties-and-thirties, because that's what most mainstream feminism seems to me. And Jezebel, which I am/was a regular reader of, is usually the absolute epitome of that.

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fermun haha, if killing babies offends you, this may not be the show for you

Ugh Jezebel. I used to read that regularly until it dawned on me that the writers and the majority of the commenting community just made me feel really gross. I think it was around the time that two of their most popular writers were interviewed on camera and they used the opportunity to get drunk and make rape jokes.

The whole password thing really bugs me because I'd only ever registered years ago to post on that shitty, shitty site.

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"Iíll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because heís pulled out."

I used to read Jezebel all the time and actually interned for them for awhile, right before that rape joke interview. That coincided with Anna Holmes leaving as head editor and Jessica Coen taking over, which I think went along with Gawker developing even more pageview pay incentives and things. It got really garbage-y really quickly. Did you guys read that N+1 piece about ladyblogs? Fischer ignored a lot of the good, actually serious parts of The Hairpin and Rookie and didn't talk about the blight of Hello Giggles at all but it's also a good look at the history of Jezebel and of online writing for women in general.

Cat, I take consolation in the fact that Jezebel, esp in its current incarnation, actually is pretty careful about not describing themselves as feminist. I try to call myself feminist to reclaim it from the assholes but really there are so many conflicting ideologies between 2nd and 3rd and 4th wave feminism that I can't blame anyone for not wanting to use the descriptor without heavy qualifications.

I always found The Hairpin fairly decent, at least in comparison to Jezebel. But honestly, Jezebel left such a bad taste in my mouth that I stopped actively searching out and reading the whatever wave feminist sites. do you have any recommendations that won't make me cross?

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"Iíll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because heís pulled out."

Skepchick is a pretty good site focusing on skeptic/atheist/rationalist stuff with a host of different perspectives (trans, former muslim, and so on). It does focus on patriarchy and feminist issues within and without the rational movement, but they do a lot of other stuff too. Rebecca Watson (the person who said that hitting on a woman in an enclosed space, like an elevator, is a bit creepy and then Richard Dawkins called her whiny and also used the word "Muslima") is consistently good.

It's very much like an atheist Slacktivist in a lot of ways.

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20:50 soberpiano i guess i could sort of see the distinction if i choked myself until i could no longer understand the significance of language

The Hairpin is mostly tiny houses and jokes, and Edith Zimmerman is super funny (her blog is never updated anymore but all those little stories are amazing), and the commentors are way better than Jezebel, and the occasional serious article is usually really good. In general though it is pretty apolitical, for the better I think.

For more political feminist stuff I'm pretty partial to Pandagon, though it's definitely US centric. Also a lot of the old Tiger Beatdown essays are really funny, and lately the articles have been written by other people and have a more global scope (which frankly I'm too poorly informed to really grasp). Everything on their by either Sady Doyle or Garland Grey is reliably good.

I'll have to check out Skepchick, it's like I don't get frothingly mad about the patriarchy often enough in the day already.